Let's Start at the Very Beginning...
On September 15th, Katy and Andy found out that Baby Jacob has a life-threatening condition called Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH). CDH is a very serious condition in which a hole in the diaphragm allows abdominal organs to move into the chest restricting lung development. In Jacob's case, his liver is also squishing his heart and displacing other organs. CDH occurs in about 1 out of every 3,000 pregnancies and has a mortality rate of 50%. To make matters more complicated, Jacob has Right-Sided CDH which only occurs in about 10% of CDH cases and is typically more severe. They are so blessed to have found this out when they did, or Baby Jacob would have surely died at birth.
They will be delivering at UW Hospital in Seattle and later transferred to Seattle Children’s. Thank you to everyone who has already begun praying, and everyone who will now. Baby Jacob is blessed to have all of you thinking and praying for him.
Aug 3, 2012 -Jacob
made us a little nervous this evening. Yesterday he had some blood work
done at Seattle Children's that came back abnormal. His potassium was
critically high which meant he was at risk of experiencing dangerous
heart arrhythmias. (Kind of ironic since he was just at the cardiologist
yesterday!) There are many scary causes for this, the most common being
kidney failure and decreased insulin levels. Being that one of Jacob's
kidney's was affected by his CDH, I was very worried that he was
beginning to have greater problems. The doctor's nurses at Children's
and the ped's office were persistently trying to get ahold of us.
Unfortunately, my cell phone was dead and misplaced and Andy was working
so no one got in touch with us until late this afternoon. Jacob's
surgeon even emailed me. The surgeon said sometimes this is due to
breakdown of red blood cells (hemolysis) during the blood draw, but
there did not appear to be hemolysis.They needed his blood redrawn STAT.
We were able to get the draw done here in Puyallup and got a call back
about 9 o'clock tonight. Everything is within normal limits now, but
it's something we will keep an eye on. Phew! Glad we know the outcome so we can get some sleep tonight with no worries!
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